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Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science

José L. Duarte, Arizona State University Jarret T. Crawford, The College of New Jersey

Charlotta Stern, Stockholm University Jonathan Haidt, New York University—Stern School of Business

Lee Jussim, Rutgers University Philip E. Tetlock, University of Pennsylvania

Corresponding Author: Jonathan Haidt, [email protected]

Abstract: Psychologists have demonstrated the value of diversity—particularly diversity of viewpoints—for enhancing creativity, discovery, and problem solving. But one key type of viewpoint diversity is lacking in academic psychology in general and social psychology in particular: political diversity. This article reviews the available evidence and finds support for four claims: 1) Academic psychology once had considerable political diversity, but has lost nearly all of it in the last 50 years; 2) This lack of political diversity can undermine the validity of social psychological science via mechanisms such as the embedding of liberal values into research questions and methods, steering researchers away from important but politically unpalatable research topics, and producing conclusions that mischaracterize liberals and conservatives alike; 3) Increased political diversity would improve social psychological science by reducing the impact of bias mechanisms such as confirmation bias, and by empowering dissenting minorities to improve the quality of the majority’s thinking; and 4) The underrepresentation of non-liberals in social psychology is most likely due to a combination of self-selection, hostile climate, and discrimination. We close with recommendations for increasing political diversity in social psychology. Keywords: Social psychology, diversity, politics, bias, sociology of science

POLITICAL DIVERSITY -- 3

Political Diversity Will Improve Social Psychological Science

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that."

–John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859/2002)

1. Introduction

In the last few years, social psychology has faced a series of challenges to the validity of

its research, including a few high-profile replication failures, a handful of fraud cases, and

several articles on questionable research practices and inflated effect sizes (John, Loewenstein &

Prelec, 2012; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). In response, the Society for Personality

and Social Psychology (SPSP) convened a Task Force on Publication and Research Practices

which provided a set of statistical, methodological, and practical recommendations intended to

both limit integrity failures and broadly increase the robustness and validity of social psychology

(Funder et al., 2014, p. 18). In this article we suggest that one largely overlooked cause of failure

is a lack of political diversity. We review evidence suggesting that political diversity and dissent

would improve the reliability and validity of social psychological science.

We are not the first to make this point. Tetlock (1994) identified ways in which moral-

political values led to unjustified conclusions about nuclear deterrence and prejudice, and

Redding (2001) showed how the lack of political diversity across psychology’s subfields

threatens the validity of the conclusions of psychological science. Unfortunately, these concerns

have gone largely unheeded. As we shall show, the reasons for concern are even greater now

than when Tetlock and Redding published their critiques.


This article makes five distinct contributions to the scientific literature, each

corresponding to a separate section of the paper. Section two shows that although psychology

once had considerable political diversity, the trend over the last four decades has been toward

political homogeneity. Section three identifies three risks points where the lack of political

diversity can undermine the validity of scientific research claims. Section four draws on findings

from organizational psychology to show how increasing political diversity can improve social

psychological science. Section five examines possible sources of political homogeneity in social

psychology today, including differences between liberals and non-liberals in ability and interest,

hostility toward non-liberal views, and discrimination against non-liberals. In section six, we

offer recommendations for how social psychologists can increase political diversity within their

own ranks and reduce the harmful effects of political homogeneity on their research.

Some comments on terminology are needed before we begin. First, we use the term

“social psychology” to also include personality psychology because the two fields are closely

intertwined and because it is awkward to refer repeatedly to “social and personality

psychological science.” We focus on social psychology because it is the subfield of psychology

that most directly examines ideologically controversial topics, and is thus most in need of

political diversity. Second, we focus on conservatives as an under-represented group because the

data on the prevalence in psychology of different ideological groups is best for the liberal-

conservative contrast—and the departure from the proportion of liberals and conservatives in the

U.S. population is so dramatic. However, we argue that the field needs more non-liberals

however they specifically self-identify (e.g., libertarian, moderate). Third, it is important to

recognize that conservatism is not monolithic—indeed, self-identified conservatives may be

more diverse in their political beliefs than are liberals (Feldman & Johnston, 2014; Klein &


Stern, 2005; Stenner, 2009). Fourth, we note for the curious reader that the collaborators on this

article include one liberal, one centrist, two libertarians, one whose politics defy a simple

left/right categorization, and one neo-positivist contrarian who favors a don't-ask-don't-tell policy

in which scholarship should be judged on its merits. None identifies as conservative or

Republican.

A final preparatory comment we must make is that the lack of political diversity is not a

threat to the validity of specific studies in many and perhaps most areas of research in social

psychology. The lack of diversity causes problems for the scientific process primarily in areas

related to the political concerns of the left—areas such as race, gender, stereotyping,

environmentalism, power, and inequality—as well as in areas where conservatives themselves

are studied, such as in moral and political psychology. And even in those areas, we are not

suggesting that most of the studies are flawed or erroneous. Rather, we argue that the collective

efforts of researchers in politically charged areas may fail to converge upon the truth when there

are few or no non-liberal researchers to raise questions and frame hypotheses in alternative ways.

We do not intend this article to be an attack on social psychology – a field that has a long track

record of producing research that is vital to understanding and improving the human condition

(see examples in Zimbardo, 2004). We are proud to be social psychologists, and we believe that

our field can—and will—embrace some relatively simple methods of using diversity to improve

itself as a science.

2. Psychology is Less Politically Diverse than Ever

There are many academic fields in which surveys find self-identified conservatives to be

about as numerous as self-identified liberals; typically business, computer science, engineering,


health sciences, and technical/vocational fields (Zipp & Fenwick, 2006; Gross & Simmons,

2007)2. In the social sciences and humanities, however, there is a stronger imbalance. For

instance, recent surveys find that 58 - 66 percent of social science professors in the United States

identify as liberals, while only 5 - 8 percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified

Democrats outnumber Republicans by ratios of at least 8 to 1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Klein &

Stern, 2009; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). A similar situation is found in the humanities where

surveys find that 52 - 77 percent of humanities professors identify as liberals, while only 4 - 8

percent identify as conservatives, and that self-identified Democrats outnumber Republicans by

ratios of at least 5:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). In psychology the

imbalance is slightly stronger: 84 percent identify as liberal while only 8 percent identify as

conservative (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008). That is a ratio of 10.5 to 1. In

the United States as a whole, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is roughly 1 to 2 (Gallup,

2010).

Has academic psychology always tilted so far left? The existing data is imperfect, as the

only data we could find that date back beyond a few decades examined party identification

(Democrat vs. Republican; McClintock, Spaulding, & Turner 1965), not ideological self-

placement. Before the 1980s, party identification did not correlate with the left-right dimension

as strongly as it does today (Barber & McCarty, 2013). There used to be substantial minorities of

liberal Republicans and conservative Democrats. Nonetheless, since the early 20th

century, the

Democratic Party has been the left-leaning party and the Republican Party has been the right-

leaning party (Levendusky, 2009). In Figure 1, we have plotted all available data points on the

political identity of psychologists at American colleges and universities, including both party

identification (diamonds) and liberal-conservative identification (circles). Both sets of measures


show a strong left-ward movement. Psychology professors were as likely to report voting

Republican as Democrat in presidential contests in the 1920s. From the 1930s through 1960, they

were more likely to report voting for Democrats, but substantial minorities voted for Wilkie,

Eisenhower, and Nixon (in 1960). By 2006, however, the ratio of Democrats to Republicans had

climbed to more than 11:1 (Gross & Simmons, 2007; Rothman & Lichter, 2008).

Is social psychology less politically diverse than academic psychology as a whole? There

has never been an extensive or representative survey of the political attitudes of social

psychologists, but we do have two imperfect sources of evidence. One of the largest gatherings

of social psychologists is the presidential symposium at SPSP’s annual meeting. At the 2011

meeting in San Antonio, Texas, Jonathan Haidt asked the roughly 1,000 attendees to identify

themselves politically with a show of hands. He counted the exact number of hands raised for the

options “conservative or on the right” (3 hands), “moderate or centrist” (20 hands), and

“libertarian” (12 hands). For the option “liberal or on the left,” it was not possible to count, but

he estimated that approximately 80% of the audience raised a hand (i.e., roughly 800 liberals).

The corresponding liberal-conservative ratio of 267:1 is surely an overestimate; in this non-

anonymous survey, many conservatives may have been reluctant to raise their hands. But if

conservatives were disproportionately reluctant to self-identify, it illustrates the problem we are

raising.

The other piece of evidence we have comes from an anonymous internet survey

conducted by Inbar and Lammers (2012), who set out to test Haidt’s claim that there were hardly

any conservatives in social psychology. They sent an email invitation to the entire SPSP

discussion list, from which 2923 individuals participated. Inbar & Lammers found that 85 percent

of these respondents declared themselves liberal, 9 percent moderate, and only 6 percent


conservative4 (a ratio of 14:1). Furthermore, the trend toward political homogeneity seems to be

continuing: whereas 10% of faculty respondents self-identified as conservative, only 2% of

graduate students and postdocs did so (Inbar, 2013, personal communication). This pattern is

consistent with the broader trends throughout psychology illustrated in Figure 1: the field is

shifting leftward, the ratio of liberals to conservatives is now greater than 10:1, and there are

hardly any conservative students in the pipeline.

3. Three Ways That the Lack of Diversity Undermines Social Psychology

If left unchecked, an academic field can become a cohesive moral community, creating a

shared reality (Hardin & Higgins, 1996) that subsequently blinds its members to morally or

ideologically undesirable hypotheses and unanswered but important scientific questions (Haidt,

2012). The sociologist Christian Smith (2003) has studied such moral communities within the

academy and has identified a set of moral narratives that link researchers’ conceptions of history

to their conceptions of their research. Smith describes the left-leaning field of sociology as

sharing what he calls the “liberal progress narrative.”

Once upon a time, the vast majority of human persons suffered in societies and social

institutions that were unjust, unhealthy, repressive, and oppressive. These traditional

societies were reprehensible because of their deep-rooted inequality, exploitation, and

irrational traditionalism ... But the noble human aspiration for autonomy, equality, and

prosperity struggled mightily against the forces of misery and oppression, and eventually

succeeded in establishing modern, liberal, democratic… welfare societies. While modern

social conditions hold the potential to maximize the individual freedom and pleasure of


all, there is much work to be done to dismantle the powerful vestiges of inequality,

exploitation, and repression. This struggle for the good society in which individuals are

equal and free to pursue their self-defined happiness is the one mission truly worth

dedicating one’s life to achieving. (Smith, 2003, p. 82)

Although Smith wrote this narrative for sociology, it is a plausible shared narrative for

social psychology—a field that has produced copious research on racism, sexism, stereotypes,

and the baneful effects of power and obedience to authority. Given the political homogeneity

demonstrated in section 1 of this paper, the field of social psychology is at risk of becoming a

cohesive moral community. Might a shared moral-historical narrative in a politically

homogeneous field undermine the self-correction processes on which good science depends? We

think so, and present three risk points— three ways in which political homogeneity can threaten

the validity of social psychological science—and examples from the extant literature illustrating

each point.

3.1 Risk Point #1: Liberal values and assumptions can become embedded into theory and

method

Political values can become embedded into research questions in ways that make some

constructs unobservable and unmeasurable, thereby invalidating attempts at hypothesis testing

(Sniderman & Tetlock, 1986; Tetlock & Mitchell, 1993; Tetlock, 1994). The embedding of

values occurs when value statements or ideological claims are wrongly treated as objective truth,

and observed deviation from that truth is treated as error.


Example 1: Denial of environmental realities. Feygina, Jost and Goldsmith (2010)

sought to explain the “denial of environmental realities” using system justification theory (Jost &

Banaji, 1994). In operationalizing such denial, the authors assessed the four constructs listed

below, with example items in parentheses:

Construct 1: Denial of the possibility of an ecological crisis (“If things continue on their

present course, we will soon experience a major environmental catastrophe,” reverse

scored).

Construct 2: Denial of limits to growth (“The earth has plenty of natural resources if we

just learn how to develop them.”)

Construct 3: Denial of the need to abide by the constraints of nature (“Humans will

eventually learn enough about how nature works to be able to control it.”)

Construct 4: Denial of the danger of disrupting balance in nature (“The balance of nature

is strong enough to cope with the impacts of modern industrial nations.”)

The core problem with this research is that it misrepresents those who merely disagree

with environmentalist values and slogans as being in “denial.” Indeed, the papers Feygina et al

(2010) cited in support of their “denial” questions never used the terms “deny” or denial” to

describe these measures. Clark, Kotchen, and Moore (2003) referred to the items as assessing

“attitudes” and Dunlap, Van Liere, Mertig, and Jones (2000) characterized the items as tapping

“primitive beliefs” (p. 439) about the environment.

The term “denial” implies that 1) the claim being denied is a “reality” – that is, a

descriptive fact, and that 2) anyone who fails to endorse the pro-environmental side of these


claims is engaged in a psychological process of denial. We next describe why both claims are

false, and why the measures, however good they are at assessing attitudes or primitive beliefs,

fail to assess denial.

Construct 1 refers to a “possibility” so that denial would be belief that an ecological crisis

was impossible. This was not assessed and the measure that supposedly tapped this construct

refers to no descriptive fact. Without defining “soon” or “major” or “crisis,” it is impossible for

this to be a fact. Without being a statement of an actual fact, disagreeing with the statement does

not, indeed cannot, represent denial.

Similar problems plague Construct 2 and its measurement. Denial of the limits of growth

could be measured by agreement with an alternative statement, such as “The Earth’s natural

resources are infinite.” Agreement could be considered a form of denial of the limits of growth.

However, this was not assessed. Absent a definition of “plenty,” it is not clear how this item

could be refuted or confirmed. If it cannot be refuted or confirmed, it cannot be a descriptive

fact. If it is not a fact, it can be agreed or disagreed with, but there is no “denial.” Even strongly

agreeing with this statement does not necessarily imply denying that there are limits to growth.

“Plenty” does not imply “unlimited.” Moreover, the supposed reality being denied is, in fact,

heavily disputed by scholars, and affirming the Earth’s resources as plentiful for human needs,

given human ingenuity, was a winning strategy in a famous scientific bet (Sabin, 2013).

Construct 3 is an injunction that we need to abide by the constraints of nature. Again

“constraints of nature” is a vague and undefined term. Further, the construct is not a descriptive

fact – it is a philosophical/ideological prescription, and the item is a prophecy about the future,

which can never be a fact. Thus, this construct might capture some attitude towards

environmentalism, but it does not capture denial of anything. It would be just as unjustified to


label those who disagree with the item as being in denial about human creativity, innovation, and

intelligence.

Construct 4 is similarly problematic. “Balance in nature” is another vague term, and the

item assessing this construct is another vague prediction. One can agree or disagree with the

item. And such differences may indeed by psychologically important. Disagreement, however,

is not the same construct as denial.

Whether some people deny actual environmental realities, and if so, why, remains an

interesting and potentially scientifically tractable question. For example, one might assess

“environmental denial” by showing people a time-lapse video taken over several years showing

ocean levels rising over an island, and asking people if sea levels were rising. There would be a

prima facie case for identifying those who answered “no” to such a question as “denying

environmental realities.” However, Feygina et al. (2010) did not perform such studies. Instead,

they simply measured support for primitive environmentalist beliefs and values, called low levels

of such support denial, and regressed it on the system justification scores and other measures (a

third, experimental study, did not assess denial). None of Feygina et al.’s (2010) measures refer

to environmental realities. Thus, the studies were not capable of producing scientific evidence of

denial of environmental realities.

Vague environmentalist philosophical slogans and values are unjustifiably converted to

scientific truths even though no data could ever tell us whether humans should “abide by the

constraints of nature.” It is not just that people have different environmental attitudes; the

problem is the presumption that one set of attitudes is right and those who disagree are in denial.

This conversion of a widely shared political ideology into “reality,” and its concomitant


treatment of dissent as denial, testifies to the power of embedded values to distort science within

a cohesive moral community.

Example 2: Ideology and unethical behavior. Son Hing, Bobocel, Zanna, and McBride

(2007) found that: 1) people high in social dominance orientation (SDO) were more likely to

make unethical decisions, 2) people high in right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) were more likely

to go along with the unethical decisions of leaders, and 3) dyads with high SDO leaders and high

RWA followers made more unethical decisions than dyads with alternative arrangements (e.g.,

low SDO—low RWA dyads).

Yet consider the decisions they defined as unethical: not formally taking a female

colleague’s side in her sexual harassment complaint against her subordinate (given little

information about the case), and a worker placing the well-being of his or her company above

unspecified harms to the environment attributed to the company’s operations. Liberal values of

feminism and environmentalism were embedded directly into the operationalization of ethics,

even to the extent that participants were expected to endorse those values in vignettes that lacked

the information one would need to make a considered judgment.

How to recognize and avoid embedded values biases. The appearance of certain words

that imply pernicious motives (e.g., deny, legitimize, rationalize, justify, defend, trivialize) may

be particularly indicative of research tainted by embedded values. Such terms imply, for

example, that the view being denied is objectively valid and the view being “justified” is

objectively invalid. In some cases, this may be scientifically tenable, as when a researcher is

interested in the denial of some objective fact. Rationalization can be empirically demonstrated,

but doing so requires more than declaring some beliefs to be rationalizations, as in Napier and


Jost (2008), where endorsement of the efficacy of hard work – on one item – was labeled

rationalization of inequality.

Turnabout tests often constitute a simple tool for identifying and avoiding embedded

values bias (Tetlock, 1994). Imagine a counterfactual social psychology field in which

conservative political views were treated as “scientific facts” and disagreements with

conservative views treated as denial or error. In this field, scholars might regularly publish

studies on "the denial of the benefits of free market capitalism” or “the denial of the benefits of a

strong military” or “the denial of the benefits of church attendance.” Or, they might publish

studies showing that people low in RWA and SDO (i.e., liberals) are more unethical because they

are more willing to disrespect authority, disregard private property, and restrict voluntary

individual choice in the marketplace. Embedding any type of ideological values into measures is

dangerous to science. Later in this paper we review evidence suggesting that this is much more

likely to happen – and to go unchallenged by dissenters – in a politically homogeneous field.

3.2 Risk Point #2: Researchers may concentrate on topics that validate the liberal progress

narrative and avoid topics that contest that narrative

Since the enlightenment, scientists have thought of themselves as spreading light and

pushing back the darkness. The metaphor is apt, but in a politically homogeneous field, a larger-

than-optimal number of scientists shine their flashlights on ideologically important regions of the

terrain. Doing so leaves many areas unexplored. Even worse, some areas become walled off, and

inquisitive researchers risk ostracism if they venture in (see Redding 2013 for a discussion of a

recent example in sociology). Political homogeneity in social psychology can restrict the range


of possible research programs or questions. It may also deprive us of tools and research findings

we need to address pressing social issues. Two examples below illustrate this threat.

Example 1: Stereotype accuracy. Since the 1930s, social psychologists have been

proclaiming the inaccuracy of social stereotypes, despite lacking evidence of such inaccuracy.

Evidence has seemed unnecessary because stereotypes have been, in effect, stereotyped as

inherently nasty and inaccurate (see Jussim, 2012a for a review).

Some group stereotypes are indeed hopelessly crude and untestable. But some may rest

on valid empiricism—and represent subjective estimates of population characteristics (e.g. the

proportion of people who drop out of high school, are victims of crime, or endorse policies that

support women at work, see Jussim, 2012a, Ryan, 2002 for reviews). In this context, it is not

surprising that the rigorous empirical study of the accuracy of factual stereotypes was initiated by

one of the very few self-avowed conservatives in social psychology—Clark McCauley

(McCauley & Stitt, 1978). Since then, dozens of studies by independent researchers have

yielded evidence that stereotype accuracy (of all sorts of stereotypes) is one of the most robust

effects in all of social psychology (Jussim, 2012a). Here is a clear example of the value of

political diversity: a conservative social psychologist asked a question nobody else thought (or

dared) to ask, and found results that continue to make many social psychologists uncomfortable.

McCauley’s willingness to put the assumption of stereotype inaccuracy to an empirical test led to

the correction of one of social psychology’s most longstanding errors.

Example 2: The scope and direction of prejudice. Prejudice and intolerance have long

been considered the province of the political right (e.g., Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson, &

Sanford, 1950; Duckitt, 2001; Lindner & Nosek, 2009). Indeed, since Allport (1954), social

psychologists have suspected that there is a personality type associated with generalized


prejudice toward a variety of social groups (Akrami, Ekehammar, & Bergh, 2011), which they

have linked to political conservatism (Roets & van Hiel, 2011). More recently, however, several

scholars have noted that the groups typically considered targets of prejudice in such research

programs are usually low status and often left-leaning (e.g., African-Americans and

Communists; for more examples and further arguments, see Chambers, Schlenker & Collisson,

2013 and Crawford & Pilanski, 2013). Using research designs that include both left-leaning and

right-leaning targets, and using nationally representative as well as student and community

samples, these researchers have demonstrated that prejudice is potent on both the left and right.

Conservatives are prejudiced against stereotypically left-leaning targets (e.g., African-

Americans), whereas liberals are prejudiced against stereotypically right-leaning targets (e.g.,

religious Christians; see Chambers et al., 2013; Crawford & Pilanski, 2013; Wetherell, Brandt, &

Reyna, 2013).

Summarizing these recent findings, Brandt, Reyna, Chambers, Crawford, and Wetherell

(2014) put forward the ideological conflict hypothesis, which posits that people across the

political spectrum are prejudiced against ideologically dissimilar others. Once again, the shared

moral narrative of social psychology seems to have restricted the range of research: the

investigation of prejudice was long limited to prejudice against the targets that liberals care most

about. But the presence of a non-liberal researcher (John Chambers is a libertarian) led to an

expansion of the range of targets, which might, over time, lead the entire field to a more nuanced

view of the relationship between politics and prejudice.

How to avoid a narrow emphasis on topics that advance liberal narratives. When

researchers primarily focus on addressing questions that advance liberal narratives, or

systematically ignore research inconsistent with liberal narratives, the risk of political bias


increases. Instead of assuming that stereotypes are inaccurate without citing evidence, ask, “How

(in)accurate are stereotypes? What has empirical research found?” Instead of asking, “Why are

conservatives so prejudiced and politically intolerant?” (Hodson & Busseri, 2012; Lindner &

Nosek, 2009), ask, “Which groups are targets of prejudice and intolerance across the political

spectrum, and why?” (Brandt et al., 2014). One does not need to be politically conservative to

ask the latter questions. Indeed, one of the authors of the ideological conflict hypothesis

(Crawford) self-describes as liberal. Thus, simply having an ideology does not inevitably lead to

biased research, even on politicized topics. Nonetheless, as we show later in this paper, having a

greater number of nonliberal scientists would likely reduce the time it takes for social

psychology to correct longstanding errors on politicized topics.

3.3 Risk Point #3: Negative attitudes regarding conservatives can produce a psychological

science that mischaracterizes their traits and attributes

A long-standing view in social-political psychology is that the right is more dogmatic and

intolerant of ambiguity than the left, a view Tetlock (1983) dubbed the rigidity-of-the-right

hypothesis. Altemeyer (1996; 1998) argued that a consequence of this asymmetry in rigidity is

that those on the right (specifically, people high in RWA) should be more prone to making

biased political judgment than those on the left. For example, Altemeyer (1996) found that

people high in RWA were biased in favor of Christian over Muslim mandatory school prayer in

American and Arab public schools, respectively, whereas people low in RWA opposed

mandatory school prayer regardless of the religious target group. On the basis of these and other

results, Altemeyer (1996) characterized people high in RWA (who tend to be socially

conservative) as hypocritical and rigid, and people low in RWA (who tend to be socially liberal)


as consistent and fair-minded. Others have relied on this evidence to make similar arguments

(e.g., Peterson, Duncan, & Pang, 2002). But had social psychologists studied a broad enough

range of situations to justify these broad conclusions? Recent evidence suggests not. The

ideologically objectionable premise model (IOPM; Crawford, 2012) posits that people on the

political left and right are equally likely to approach political judgments with their ideological

blinders on. That said, they will only do so when the premise of a political judgment is

ideologically acceptable. If it’s objectionable, any preferences for one group over another will be

short-circuited, and biases won’t emerge. The IOPM thus allows for biases to emerge only

among liberals, only among conservatives, or among both liberals and conservatives, depending

on the situation. For example, reinterpreting Altemeyer’s mandatory school prayer results,

Crawford (2012) argued that for people low in RWA who value individual freedom and

autonomy, mandatory school prayer is objectionable; thus, the very nature of the judgment

should shut off any biases in favor of one target over the other. However, for people high in

RWA who value society-wide conformity to traditional morals and values, mandating school

prayer is acceptable; this acceptable premise then allows for people high in RWA to express a

bias in favor of Christian over Muslim school prayer. Crawford (2012, Study 1) replaced

mandatory prayer with voluntary prayer, which would be acceptable to both people high and low

in RWA. In line with the IOPM, people high in RWA were still biased in favor of Christian over

Muslim prayer, while people low in RWA now showed a bias in favor of Muslim over Christian

voluntary prayer. Hypocrisy is therefore not necessarily a special province of the right. In

another study, Crawford (2012, Study 2) reasoned that the left typically finds it acceptable to

criticize and question authority. Therefore, a scenario involving a subordinate criticizing an

authority figure would permit people low in RWA to punish a subordinate who criticizes an


ideologically similar leader (e.g., President Barack Obama) more harshly than one who criticizes

an ideologically dissimilar leader (e.g., President George W. Bush). However, such criticism of

authority represents an objectionable premise for people high in RWA—thus, they should punish

the subordinate equally, regardless of the leader’s identity. Consistent with the IOPM, people

low in RWA more harshly punished a military general who criticized Obama than one who

criticized Bush, whereas people high in RWA punished the general equally regardless of the

target leader’s identity. Thus, this scenario shows the reversal of Altemeyer’s findings—biases

emerged among the left, but not the right. Results from seven scenarios have supported the

ideologically objectionable premise model (see Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, 2013)

and indicate that biased political judgments are not predicted by ideological orientation (as per

Altemeyer), but rather by the qualities of the judgment scenarios used in the research.

These example illustrate the threats to truth-seeking that emerge when members of a

politically homogenous intellectual community are motivated to cast their perceived outgroup

(i.e., the ones who violate the liberal progressive narrative) in a negative light. If there were more

social psychologists who were motivated to question the design and interpretation of studies

biased towards liberal values during peer review, or if there were more researchers running their

own studies using different methods, social psychologists could be more confident in the validity

of their characterizations of conservatives (and liberals).

Detecting and avoiding mischaracterizing the traits of conservatives. One red flag is

the uniformity of the disparaging conclusions about conservatives. If empirical results

consistently portray conservatives negatively and liberals positively, this may signal a problem

of political bias. The potential for political bias is likely greatly reduced when researchers seek to

explain the motivations, foibles, and strengths of liberals as well as conservatives. Several


programs of research have found evidence of strengths and weaknesses among both liberals and

conservatives, including moral foundations theory (e.g., Haidt, 2012), the ideologically

objectionable premise model (Crawford, 2012; Crawford & Xhambazi, in press), and the

ideological conflict hypothesis (e.g., Brandt et al., 2014; Crawford, Modri, & Motyl, 2013;

Munro, Lasane, & Leary, 2010). This evidence disconfirms the hypothesis that conservatives

really do warrant relentless scientific condemnation. If one wishes to focus on just conservatives

(or just liberals), understanding their weaknesses and strengths would seem to be more

theoretically productive and less open to a charge of political bias.

We do not mean to suggest that liberals cannot do fair and unbiased work on charged

topics. For example, a number of scholars are producing balanced work on people’s reactions

toward left-wing and right-wing authority figures (Frimer, Gaucher, & Schaefer, in press), value-

based behavioral attributions across the political spectrum (Morgan, Mullen, & Skitka, 2010),

and people’s beliefs about scientific consensus on hot-button political issues (Kahan, Jenkins-

Smith, & Braman, 2011), to name just a few. Nor do we mean to invalidate anyone’s research

program by pointing to specific problems in the examples we discussed above. Indeed, we

appreciate the even-handed approaches some of these authors have taken in other lines of their

research (e.g., research on meritocracy and affirmative action support by Son Hing, Bobocel, &

Zanna, 2002). These important lines of research indicate that the disconfirmation processes in

our field are not entirely broken. However, if we look at the field as a whole and think of it as a

complex system that depends on broad-ranging inquiry and institutionalized disconfirmation

efforts, we are confident that the parameters are not set properly for the optimum discovery of

truth. More political diversity would help the system discover more truth.


4. Why Political Diversity is Likely to Improve Social Psychological Science

Diversity can be operationalized in many ways, including demographic diversity (e.g.,

ethnicity, race, and gender) and viewpoint diversity (e.g., variation in intellectual viewpoints or

professional expertise). Research in organizational psychology suggest that: a) the benefits of

viewpoint diversity are more consistent and pronounced than those of demographic diversity

(Menz, 2012; Williams & O’Reilly, 1998); and b) the benefits of viewpoint diversity are most

pronounced when organizations are pursuing open-ended exploratory goals (e.g., scientific

discovery) as opposed to exploitative goals (e.g., applying well-established routines to well-

defined problems; Cannella, Park & Hu, 2008).

Seeking demographic diversity has many benefits (Crisp & Turner, 2011), including

combating effects of past and present discrimination, increasing tolerance, and, in academic

contexts, creating bodies of faculty who will be more demographically appealing to students

from diverse demographic backgrounds. However socially beneficial such effects may be, they

have little direct relation to the conduct or validity of science. Viewpoint diversity may therefore

be more valuable than demographic diversity if social psychology’s core goal is to produce

broadly valid and generalizable conclusions. (Of course, demographic diversity can bring

viewpoint diversity, but if it is viewpoint diversity that is wanted, then it may be more effective

to pursue it directly.) It is the lack of political viewpoint diversity that makes social psychology

vulnerable to the three risks described in the previous section. Political diversity is likely to have

a variety of positive effects by reducing the impact of two familiar mechanisms that we explore

below: confirmation bias and groupthink/majority consensus.

4.1 Confirmation Bias


People tend to search for evidence that will confirm their existing beliefs while also

ignoring or downplaying disconfirming evidence. This confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998) is

widespread among both laypeople and scientists (Ioannidis, 2012). It is extremely difficult to

avoid confirmation bias in everyday reasoning; for example, courses in “critical thinking”

temporarily suppress confirmation bias, but do not eliminate it (Lilienfeld, Ammirati, &

Landfield, 2009). Even research communities of highly intelligent and well-meaning individuals

can fall prey to confirmation bias, as IQ is positively correlated with the number of reasons

people find to support their own side in an argument, and is uncorrelated with the (much lower)

number of reasons people find to support the opposing argument (Perkins, Farady & Bushey,

1991).

Confirmation bias can become even stronger when people confront questions that trigger

moral emotions and concerns about group identity (Haidt, 2001; 2012). Further, group-

polarization often exacerbates extremism in echo chambers (Lamm & Myers, 1978). Indeed,

people are far better at identifying the flaws in other people’s evidence-gathering than in their

own, especially if those other people have dissimilar beliefs (e.g., Mercier & Sperber, 2011;

Sperber et al., 2010). Although such processes may be beneficial for communities whose goal is

social cohesion (e.g., a religious or activist movement), they can be devastating for scientific

communities by leading to widely-accepted claims that reflect the scientific community’s blind

spots more than they reflect justified scientific conclusions (see, e.g., the three risk points

discussed previously).

The peer review process likely offers much less protection against error when the

community of peers is politically homogeneous. Ideally, reviewers should scrutinize and criticize

the methods of a paper equally closely regardless of whether or not they approve of the findings.


Yet confirmation biases would lead reviewers to work extra hard to find flaws with papers whose

conclusions they dislike, and to be more permissive about methodological issues when they

endorse the conclusions. This is exactly what has been found in experimental studies

(Abramowitz, Gomes, & Abramowitz, 1975; Ceci, Peters, & Plotkin, 1985; both described

below).

In this way, certain assumptions, theories, and findings can become the entrenched

wisdom in a field, not because they are correct but because they have consistently undergone less

critical scrutiny. When most people in a field share the same confirmation bias, that field is at a

higher risk of reaching unjustified conclusions. The most obvious cure for this problem is to

increase the viewpoint diversity of the field. Nobody has found a way to eradicate confirmation

bias in individuals (Lilienfeld et al., 2009), but we can diversify the field to the point where

individual viewpoint biases begin to cancel each other out.

4.2 Minority Influence

Minority influence research has focused on the processes by which minorities influence

majority members’ (and thus the groups’) reasoning (e.g., Crano, 2012; Moscovici & Personnaz,

1980). Majorities influence decision-making by producing conformity pressure that creates

cohesion and community, but they do little to enhance judgmental depth or quality (Crisp &

Turner, 2011; Moscovici & Personnaz, 1980). They also risk creating the type of groupthink that

has long been a target of criticism by social psychologists (e.g., Fiske, Harris, & Cuddy, 2004;

Janis, 1972).

In contrast, a dissenting minority can undermine group-cohesion norms (Crano, 2012).

Such norms can become dysfunctional for scientific communities, especially when they lead


those communities to sacrifice scientific skepticism for the sake of advancing a political agenda

(see, e.g., Eagly, 1995; Jussim, 2012b; Redding, 2001 for examples). For a scientific

community, discord may be beneficial as it motivates majority members to think more deeply

about the issues at stake (Crano, 2012). In scientific contexts, the evidence or logic provided by

the minority may sometimes be so persuasive that it wins the majority. Alternatively, if the

majority view was correct all along, then the validity and credibility of the majority view is

strengthened by withstanding a forceful attempt at falsification by the minority (Popper, 1959;

1968). The many benefits of these processes have been borne out by research on minority

influence, which shows that the deeper thought produced by dissent can lead to higher-quality

group decisions (Crisp & Turner, 2011; Moscovici & Personnaz, 1980; Nemeth, 1995; Nemeth,

Brown & Rogers, 2001).

There is even evidence that politically diverse teams produce more creative solutions than

do politically homogeneous teams on problems such as “how can a person of average talent

achieve fame” and how to find funding for a partially-built church ineligible for bank loans

(Triandis, Hall, & Ewen, 1965). Pairs constituting one liberal and one conservative produced

more creative solutions to these problems than did liberal-liberal or conservative-conservative

pairings. There is abundant evidence that viewpoint diversity can and often does lead to novel

solutions to a variety of problems (Crano, 2012; Mannix & Neale, 2005). Indeed, some social

scientists have gone so far as to portray the problem-solving benefits of diversity as a necessary

logico-mathematical truth, not just a contingent empirical one (Page, 2008—although see

Tetlock, 2007).

In sum, there are grounds for hypothesizing that increased political diversity would

improve the quality of social psychological science because it would increase the degree of


scientific dissent, especially, on such politicized issues as inequality versus equity, the

psychological characteristics of liberals and conservatives, stereotypes, prejudice, and

discrimination. Social psychologists have shown these effects in many settings; they could take

advantage of them within their own ranks.

5. Why Are There So Few Non-Liberals in Social Psychology?

The question of why conservatives and other non-liberals are underrepresented

throughout the social sciences is complex (Klein & Stern, 2005), and the evidence does not point

to a single answer. To understand why conservatives are so vastly underrepresented in social

psychology, we consider five explanations that have frequently been offered to account for a lack

of diversity not just in social psychology, but in other contexts (e.g., the underrepresentation of

women and ethnic minorities in STEM fields, e.g., Pinker, 2008).

5.1 Differences in Ability

One explanation offered for the scarcity of conservatives in social psychology (and in the

academy more broadly) is that liberals are more intelligent than conservatives and therefore

better able to obtain doctorates and faculty positions (e.g., Gilbert, 2011). The evidence does not

support this view. Before we dig into it, we should note that a serious claim that intelligence

differences explain the scarcity of non-liberals would only make sense if there were sizeable and

consistent intelligence differences – for this claim, a five-point difference on mean SAT scores

simply won’t do. Notably, the data does not yield a consistent liberal advantage, even a small

one. Some researchers have found a modest negative correlation between IQ and conservatism

(Heaven, Ciarrochi & Leeson, 2011; Hodson & Busseri, 2012). However, others have found


either no relationship (i.e., between political orientation and SAT-Math scores; Kemmelmeier,

2008), or a curvilinear relationship; specifically, Kemmelmeier (2008) found that while

conservatism generally correlated with lower SAT-Verbal scores, extreme conservatism

predicted higher SAT-Verbal scores.

Second, the observed relationship between intelligence and conservatism largely depends

on how conservatism is operationalized. Social conservatism correlates with lower cognitive

ability test scores, but economic conservatism correlates with higher scores (Iyer, Koleva,

Graham, Ditto, & Haidt, 2012; Kemmelmeier 2008). Similarly, Feldman and Johnston (2014)

find in multiple nationally representative samples that social conservatism negatively predicted

educational attainment, whereas economic conservatism positively predicted educational

attainment. Together, these results likely explain why both Heaven et al. (2011) and Hodson and

Busseri (2012) found a negative correlation between IQ and conservatism—because

“conservatism” was operationalized as Right-Wing Authoritarianism, which is more strongly

related to social than economic conservatism (van Hiel et al., 2004). In fact, Carl (2014) found

that Republicans have higher mean verbal intelligence (up to 5.48 IQ points equivalent, when

covariates are excluded), and this effect is driven by economic conservatism (which, as a

European, he called economic liberalism, because of its emphasis on free markets). Carl suggests

that libertarian Republicans overpower the negative correlation between social conservatism and

verbal intelligence, to yield the aggregate mean advantage for Republicans. Moreover, the largest

political effect in Kemmelmeier’s (2008) study was the positive correlation between anti-

regulation views and SAT-V scores, where β = .117, p < .001 (by comparison, the regression

coefficient for conservatism was β = −.088, p < .01, and for being African American, β = −.169,

p < .001)


In summary, substantial evidence suggests that the most reliable relationships between

political orientation and intelligence are the positive correlations of both social liberalism and

economic conservatism with verbal intelligence, while no consistent correlations emerge

between political views and mathematical intelligence. This pattern is incompatible with the

hypothesis that research psychologists are overwhelmingly left-liberal because liberals are

smarter than conservatives.

5.2 The Effects of Education on Political Ideology

Another explanation for the disproportionate number of liberals in academia is that

education per se causes students to become more liberal. For example, many may view

education as “enlightening” and believe that an enlightened view comports with liberal politics.

There is little evidence that education causes students to become more liberal. Instead, several

longitudinal studies following tens of thousands of college students for many years have

concluded that political socialization in college occurs primarily as a function of one’s peers, not

education per se (Astin, 1993; Dey, 1997). These studies show that students become more liberal

if they are around liberal peers, and more conservative if around conservative peers. Even the

classic Bennington Study (Newcomb, 1943) concluded that it was conformity to liberal norms,

more than education per se, that led students to become more liberal. Thus, reference group

norms, more than educational enlightenment, lead people to become more liberal in college.

5.3 Differences in Interest

Even if differences in intelligence are small or nonexistent, might liberals simply find a

career in social psychology (or the academy more broadly) more appealing? Yes, for several


reasons. The Big-5 trait that correlates most strongly with political liberalism is openness to

experience (r = .32 in Jost, Glaser, Kruglanski, & Sulloways’s 2003 meta-analysis), and people

high in that trait are more likely to pursue careers that will let them indulge their curiosity and

desire to learn, such as a career in the academy (McCrae, 1996). An academic career requires a

Ph.D., and liberals enter (and graduate) college more interested in pursuing Ph.D.s than do

conservatives (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009). Furthermore, the personal and intellectual

priorities of liberals may predispose them to an academic career: relative to conservatives, they

are less interested in financial success and more interested in writing original works and making

a theoretical contribution to science (Woessner & Kelly-Woessner, 2009).

Such intrinsic variations in interest may be amplified by a “birds of a feather” or

“homophile” effect. “Similarity attracts” is one of the most well-established findings in social

psychology (Byrne, 1969). As a field begins to lean a certain way, the field will likely become

increasingly attractive to people suited to that leaning. Over time the group itself may become

characterized by its group members. Professors and scientists may come to be seen as liberal

just as nurses are typically thought of as being female. Once that happens, conservatives may

disproportionately self-select out of joining the dissimilar group, based on a realistic perception

that they “do not fit well.” Gross (2013) draws on interviews with and surveys of social science

academics to argue that this sort of self-selection is the main reason why the professoriate has

grown more liberal in recent decades.

Self-selection clearly plays a role. But it would be ironic if an epistemic community

resonated to empirical arguments that appear to exonerate the community of prejudice—when

that same community roundly rejects those same arguments when invoked by other institutions

to explain the under-representation of women or ethnic minorities (e.g., in STEM disciplines or


other elite professions). Gross (2013) relied heavily on self-reports of members of the target

group suspected of prejudice. But cognitive psychologists and legal scholars such as Greenwald

and Krieger (2006), and Kang and Banaji (2006) argue that this type of evidence is insensitive to

unconscious prejudices which, they insist, are pervasive when carefully assessed in controlled

lab environments. And organizational sociologists such as Reskin (2012) and Bielby (2013)

argue that structural impediments to advancement—to which individual employers tend to be

oblivious—can also bias labor markets against target groups. In our view, it is disturbing when

the thresholds of proof that behavioral and social scientists use in evaluating claims of prejudice

hinge on “whose ox is being gored” (Tetlock & Mitchell, 2009). The credibility of the scientific

community is at stake. We should not expect to emerge with our collective reputations intact if

we ground accusations of prejudice against outsiders in empirical arguments that we dismiss as

inapplicable to ourselves—a failure of the turnabout test that outsiders are likely to find

particularly galling.

That said, dispositional differences between liberals and conservatives in personality

traits and values, combined with the “birds of a feather” effect, surely explain some portion of

the under-representation of conservatives in the social sciences in general, and in social

psychology in particular. In theory, these effects could explain the entire imbalance, because

there is no clear stopping point for the purifying processes that Gross (2013) describes. If this

were the whole story, it would not undercut our epistemic arguments about the need for political

diversity. Diversity would still improve the quality of social psychological science. But it would

weaken the moral arguments. In a free society, people with different preferences may congregate

in different occupations.


But what if self-selection is not the entire explanation? What if discouragement and

discrimination are meted out to conservatives by the liberal majority? In that case, there would

be additional reasons to take corrective action.

5.4 Hostile Climate

Might self-selection be amplified by an accurate perception among conservative students

that they are not welcome in the social psychology community? Consider the narrative of

conservatives that can be formed from some recent conclusions in social psychological research:

compared to liberals, conservatives are less intelligent (Hodson & Busseri, 2012) and less

cognitively complex (Jost et al., 2003). They are more rigid, dogmatic, and inflexible (Jost et al.,

2003). Their lower IQ explains their racism and sexism (Deary, Batty, & Gale, 2008), and their

endorsement of inequality explains why they are happier than liberals (Napier & Jost, 2008).

They are hyper-responsive to threatening and negative stimuli (Hibbing, Smith, & Alford, 2013;

Oxley et al., 2008), and they adopt their political beliefs in part to assuage their fears and

anxieties (Jost et al., 2003). These conclusions do not remain confined to academic journals; they

are widely reported in the press and in popular books about why conservatives deny science

(e.g., Mooney, 2012; Tuschman, 2013).

As conservative undergraduates encounter the research literature in their social

psychology classes, might they recognize cues that the field regards them and their beliefs as

defective? And what happens if they do attend graduate school and take part in conferences,

classes, and social events in which almost everyone else is liberal? We ourselves have often

heard jokes and disparaging comments made by social psychologists about conservatives, not

just in informal settings but even from the podium at conferences and lectures. The few


conservatives who have enrolled in graduate programs hear these comments too, and some of

them wrote to Haidt in the months after his 2011 remarks at the SPSP convention to describe the

hostility and ridicule that force them to stay “in the closet” about their political beliefs—or to

leave the field entirely. Haidt (2011) put excerpts from these emails online5 (in anonymous

form); representative of them is this one from a former graduate student in a top 10 Ph.D.

program:

“I can’t begin to tell you how difficult it was for me in graduate school because I am not

a liberal Democrat. As one example, following Bush’s defeat of Kerry, one of my

professors would email me every time a soldier’s death in Iraq made the headlines; he

would call me out, publicly blaming me for not supporting Kerry in the election. I was a

reasonably successful graduate student, but the political ecology became too

uncomfortable for me. Instead of seeking the professorship that I once worked toward, I

am now leaving academia for a job in industry.”

Evidence of hostile climate is not just anecdotal. Inbar and Lammers (2012) asked

members of the SPSP discussion list: “Do you feel that there is a hostile climate towards your

political beliefs in your field?” Of 17 conservatives, 14 (82%) responded “yes” (i.e., a response

at or above the midpoint of the scale, where the midpoint was labeled “somewhat” and the top

point “very much”), with half of those responding “very much.” In contrast, only 18 of 266

liberals (7%) responded “yes”, with only two of those responding “very much.” Interestingly, 18

of 25 moderates (72%) responded “yes,” with one responding “very much.” This surprising


result suggests that the hostile climate may adversely affect not only conservatives, but anyone

who is not liberal or whose values do not align with the liberal progress narrative.

5.5 Discrimination

The literature on political prejudice demonstrates that strongly identified partisans show

little compunction about expressing their overt hostility toward the other side (e.g., Chambers et

al., 2013; Crawford & Pilanski, 2013; Haidt, 2012). Partisans routinely believe that their

hostility towards opposing groups is justified because of the threat posed to their values by

dissimilar others (see Brandt et al., 2014, for a review). Social psychologists are unlikely to be

immune to such psychological processes. Indeed, ample evidence using multiple methods

demonstrates that social psychologists do in fact act in discriminatory ways toward non-liberal

colleagues and their research.

Experimental field research has demonstrated bias against studies that contradict the

liberal progress narrative. Abramowitz et al. (1975) asked research psychologists to rate the

suitability of a manuscript for publication. The methods and analyses were held identical for all

reviewers; however, the result was experimentally varied between-subjects to suggest either that

a group of leftist political activists on a college campus were mentally healthier—or that they

were less healthy—than a comparison group of non-activists. When the leftist activists were said

to be healthier, the more liberal reviewers rated the manuscript as more publishable, and the

statistical analyses as more adequate, than when the otherwise identical manuscript reported that

the activists were less mentally healthy. The less liberal reviewers showed no such bias.

(Abramowitz et al. did not identify any conservative reviewers.)


Ceci et al. (1985) found a similar pattern. Research proposals hypothesizing either

"reverse discrimination" (i.e., against White males) or conventional discrimination (i.e., against

ethnic minorities) were submitted to 150 Internal Review Boards. Everything else about the

proposals was held constant. The "reverse discrimination" proposals were approved less often

than the conventional discrimination proposals.

In these two field studies6, the discrimination may well have been unconscious or

unintentional. But Inbar and Lammers (2012) found that most social psychologists who

responded to their survey were willing to explicitly state that they would discriminate against

conservatives. Their survey posed the question: "If two job candidates (with equal qualifications)

were to apply for an opening in your department, and you knew that one was politically quite

conservative, do you think you would be inclined to vote for the more liberal one?” Of the 237

liberals, only 42 (18%) chose the lowest scale point, “not at all.” In other words, 82% admitted

that they would be at least a little bit prejudiced against a conservative candidate, and 43%

chose the midpoint (“somewhat”) or above. In contrast, the majority of moderates (67%) and

conservatives (83%) chose the lowest scale point (“not at all”).

Inbar and Lammers (2012) assessed explicit willingness to discriminate in other ways as

well, all of which told the same story: when reviewing a grant, 82% of liberals admitted at least a

trace of bias, and 27% chose “somewhat” or above; when reviewing a paper, 78% admitted at

least a trace of bias, and 21% chose “somewhat” or above; and when inviting participants to a

symposium, 56% of liberals admitted at least a trace of bias, and 15% chose “somewhat” or

above. The combination of basic research demonstrating high degrees of hostility towards

opposing partisans, the field studies demonstrating discrimination against research projects that

are unflattering to liberals and their views, and survey results of self-reported willingness to


engage in political discrimination all point to the same conclusion: political discrimination is a

reality in social psychology. Conservative graduate students and assistant professors are

behaving rationally when they keep their political identities hidden, and when they avoid voicing

the dissenting opinions that could be of such great benefit to the field. Moderate and libertarian

students may be suffering the same fate.

6. Recommendations

In the prior sections of this paper we reviewed evidence showing that: 1) social

psychology is a politically homogenous field, with a large majority of liberals and few non-

liberals; 2) this lack of diversity can undermine the validity of social psychology research in

surprising but often hidden ways; 3) increasing political diversity would improve the quality of

social psychological science; and 4) the lack of diversity stems from a variety of processes, two

of which (hostile climate and discrimination) are under the direct control of social psychologists.

If these four claims are true, what can be done to ameliorate the threats to good science

posed by political homogeneity? We recommend solutions in three sets. First, we discuss what

social psychologists can do as a field through their organizations and governance. Second, we

discuss what professors can do as teachers and as members of academic departments. Third, we

discuss what individuals can do to reduce bias in their own research, and in their evaluations of

the research of others. This list is surely incomplete; we encourage others to offer additional

ideas for solving our discipline’s political diversity problem.

6.1 Organizational Responses


Diversity is a well-established value throughout the academy, and it enjoys broad support

in psychology. The American Psychological Association has been very thoughtful about how to

promote diversity within the field, and it issued a major report in 2005 (APA, 2005). Its task

force focused on diversity with regard to race, gender, sexual orientation, and disability, but most

of the specific recommendations in the report are appropriate for promoting political diversity as

well. Below are five of the report’s 45 recommendations, which we have edited only slightly:

1. Formulate and adopt an anti-discrimination policy resolution.

2. Implement a "climate study" regarding members' experiences, comfort/discomfort, and

positive/negative attitudes/opinions/policies affecting or about members of politically

diverse groups.

3. Expand the Publication and Communications Board’s database of conservative, moderate,

and libertarian researchers who have expertise to serve as ad hoc reviewers or on editorial

boards.

4. Conduct a study of barriers/obstacles that non-liberal students face within training

programs with the intent that these data subsequently be used in establishing formal

suggestions for enabling the training of non-liberal students.

5. Each organization should develop strategies to encourage and support research training

programs and research conferences to attract, retain, and graduate conservative and other

non-liberal doctoral students and early career professionals. Examples might include

dissertation awards, travel funds for presentations and attendance at conferences, and

other financial support targeted to graduate students.

We offer these five steps as examples of the sorts of things that our professional organizations

have already done to encourage demographic diversity. More than perhaps any other scientific


field, psychologists understand the benefits of diversity and how to attain them, and could easily

apply these principles to increase political diversity.

6.2 Professorial Responses

There are many steps that social psychologists who are also college professors can take to

encourage non-liberal students to join the field, or to “come out of the closet”7 if they are already

in the field.

1. Raise consciousness, raise awareness. Professors can acknowledge openly that political

homogeneity is a problem in the field, and can state openly that they would like this to

change. They can talk about the issue, especially in graduate courses, in faculty meetings

about hiring and promotion, at symposia, colloquia, and conferences, and informally

among faculty.

2. Welcome feedback from non-liberals. Although conservative students are just as

satisfied with their college majors as are liberal students (indicating no general difference

in attitude toward education), they are considerably less satisfied than liberal students

with their humanities and social science courses – i.e., the courses in which the

overwhelmingly leftwing politics of the faculty are most likely to manifest (Woessner &

Kelly-Woessner, 2009). Liberal professors can make it clear that they are trying to do

better, and that they would welcome emails or office visits – or even in-class challenges –

from conservative and other non-liberal students. They could preface such a welcome

with a discussion of the dangers of groupthink and the benefits for creativity and good

thinking of viewpoint diversity.


3. Expand diversity statements. Professors can ask their departments to modify the

language on their websites to include political diversity along with other kinds, in all

statements encouraging members of underrepresented groups to apply for admission.

Even if it proves difficult to get programs to make such statements, individual faculty can

do so on their personal web pages. We realize that it may seem ironic to call for diversity

initiatives aimed at non-liberals, since liberals have historically carried the banner of

diversity as an ideal. However, our recommendations are not logically constrained by

conservative doctrine, and we think adding more conservatives, libertarians, and people

with less categorical perspectives – or no political identity at all – will strengthen our

science.

6.3 Changes to Research Practices

There are several steps that researchers, journal editors, and reviewers can take to reduce

the threats to scientific validity posed by political homogeneity. It is extremely difficult to spot

bias in oneself (Pronin, Lin, & Ross, 2002), but if researchers can get better at spotting political

bias in each other, the quality of the research will still improve. Further, one potential

consequence of such changes to our scientific practices could be an increase in the attractiveness

of our discipline to non-liberals.

1. Be alert to double standards. As we have shown, findings that are at odds with liberal

values are at risk of being judged more harshly than they deserve; findings that support

liberal values are at risk of being waived through without sufficiently critical review.

Therefore, whenever researchers review a manuscript or grant proposal that touches on

ideologically charged topics, they should try a turnabout thought experiment in which


one asks oneself and one’s colleagues how they would react to researchers using the same

standards of evidence and proof to argue for the mirror-image ideological conclusion

(Tetlock, 1994).

2. Support adversarial collaborations. By encouraging people with different assumptions

to collaborate, we can move toward a more complete science of human behavior

(Diaconis, 1991). Adversarial collaboration is never easy (Mellers, Hertwig, &

Kahneman, 2001), and when there are high legal or policy stakes, it becomes even more

difficult (see the responses to Tetlock & Mitchell [2009]). Nonetheless, the SPSP task

force (2014) recommended civil adversarial collaboration in cases where one team of

researchers failed to replicate the findings of another team. We think such collaboration

would be helpful in resolving political differences too. (Of course, such collaborations

presuppose that social psychologists can find non-liberal social psychologists with whom

to collaborate). An ideologically balanced science that routinely resorted to adversarial

collaborations to resolve empirical disputes would bear a striking resemblance to Robert

Merton’s (1973) ideal-type model of a self-correcting epistemic community, one

organized around the norms of CUDOS. CUDOS is an acronym for Communism (data

are public property); Universalism (apply the same standards of evidence and proof to

claims, regardless of who is making them), Disinterestedness (vigilance against

ideological and commercial temptations to distort the truth) and Organized Skepticism

(creation of accountability systems dedicated to even-handed norm enforcement).

3. Practicing the virtues of CUDOS furthers a strong scientific culture. SPSP’s (2014)

Task Force on Publication and Research Practices recommendations emphasized the need

to contribute to a scientific culture that emphasizes getting the science right. While the


report primarily discusses statistics and methods, we have shown that validity also

requires high quality conceptual and review practices. We also need to establish norms

concerning what we do when our scientific claims are shown to be wrong. Professors

need to acknowledge erroneous claims and correct them to more accurately reflect new

findings (one rare example is Klein, 2011). Dr. Bruce Alberts, former President of the

National Academy of Sciences, made this a central point when he insisted that scientists,

“need to develop a value system where simply moving on from one’s mistakes without

publicly acknowledging them severely damages, rather than protects, a scientific

reputation” (Alberts, 2013).

7. Conclusion

Psychology was once dominated by behaviorists, who shared a limiting set of

assumptions about what constituted psychology. They also controlled nearly all outlets for

professional advancement and scientific communication, and they created a hostile climate

toward more cognitively-oriented psychologists. The stranglehold of behaviorism before the

Cognitive Revolution was described by George Miller: “The power, the honors, the authority, the

textbooks, the money, everything in psychology was owned by the behavioristic school . . . those

of us who wanted to be scientific psychologists couldn’t really oppose it. You just wouldn’t get a

job” (quoted in Baars, 1986, p. 203). Yet these differing perspectives and dissenting voices—

often dismissed, denigrated, ignored, and relegated to second class positions in their day—were

crucial for progress in psychology. The same thing may be happening today to conservative and

other non-liberal perspectives.


Others have sounded this alarm before (e.g., MacCoun, 1998; Redding, 2001; Tetlock,

1994). We have added to this small literature in three ways: 1) We have drawn on a larger set of

studies to show that the underrepresentation of non-liberals is increasing (see Figure 1); 2) we

have identified specific risk-points in the research process, and specific psychological

mechanisms by which political diversity can improve social-psychological science (e.g., via

minority influence, and by helping researchers to overcome the confirmation bias); and 3) we

have drawn on a wealth of new data (e.g., Gross, 2013; Inbar & Lammers, 2012) to provide a

more comprehensive analysis of the multiple causes of the underrepresentation of non-liberals in

social psychology.

No changes were made in response to the previous alarms, but we believe that this time

may be different. Social psychologists are in deep and productive discussions about how to

address multiple threats to the integrity of their research and publication process. This may be a

golden opportunity for the field to take seriously the threats caused by political homogeneity. We

think the case for action is strong, and we have offered specific suggestions for ways that social

psychology can increase its political diversity and minimize the effects of political bias on its

science.

The case for action becomes even stronger when we consider how our research is funded.

As the academy has become increasingly liberal, non-liberals have become increasingly

distrustful. Gauchat (2012) found that American liberals and conservatives trusted science

roughly equally from the 1970s through the early 1990s. But since the mid-1990s, conservatives’

trust has gone down while liberals’ trust has gone up. Reviewing the “science wars” of recent

decades, Moreno (2011) concluded that “the problem [for evangelical Christians] is not mistrust

of science so much as it is mistrust of scientists.” So if the academy is becoming steadily more


liberal while American politics is becoming increasingly polarized (Abramowitz, 2010), is it any

wonder that some conservative Republican politicians want to cut funding for some social

sciences? This has already happened to political science: the recently passed Coburn Amendment

placed severe limits on political scientists’ access to federal funding (APA, 2013). We aspire to

prevent social psychology, or psychology more broadly, from being next. And we certainly could

be: in March 2014, the U.S. House Science, Space and Technology’s Research Subcommittee

introduced HR 4186, which proposed $150 million in cuts (a 42% decrease) in NSF funding to

social and behavioral sciences. SPSP’s response was swift, encouraging members to contact their

congressional representatives and encourage them to oppose this resolution. Such Congressional

actions should cause us to pause and consider whether perceptions of the social science’s

ideological lopsidedness have inspired such legislation.

We have focused on social (and personality) psychology, but the problems we describe

occur in other areas of psychology (Redding, 2001), as well as in other social sciences (Gross,

2013; Redding, 2013). Fortunately, psychology is uniquely well-prepared to rise to the challenge.

The five core values of APA include “continual pursuit of excellence; knowledge and its

application based upon methods of science; outstanding service to its members and to society;

social justice, diversity and inclusion; ethical action in all that we do.” (APA, 2009). If

discrimination against non-liberals exists at even half the level described in section 4 of this

paper, and if this discrimination damages the quality of some psychological research, then all

five core values are being betrayed. Will psychologists tolerate and defend the status quo, or will

psychology make the changes needed to realize its values and improve its science? Social

psychology can and should lead the way.


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Figure 1: The political party and ideological sympathies of academic psychologists have shifted

leftward over time. Circles show ratios of self-reports of liberal vs. conservative. Diamonds show

ratios of self-reports of party preference or voting (Democrat vs. Republican). Data for 1924-

1960 is reported in McClintock et al. (1965). Open diamonds are participants' recollections of

whom they voted for; gray diamonds are self-reported party identification at time of the survey.

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ratio of self-identified Liberal:Conservative social psychologists.


Endnotes

1 All authors contributed heavily and are listed in reverse order of career seniority.

2 Both studies include community colleges in their analyses.

3 Inbar and Lammers (2012) conducted two surveys using the same mailing list. Their first survey was shorter and

received 508 responses. This survey did not ask for an overall political identity; it asked for identity on economic

issues, social issues, and foreign policy issues. Of these three we believe that being a social conservative is the one

that carries the strongest taboo; only 3.9% of respondents said they were conservative on social issues. We note that

Inbar and Lammers found more respondents willing to say that they were conservative on economic issues (17.9%)

and on foreign policy issues (10.3%). But we believe it is overall identity – the willingness to say “I am a

conservative” vs. “I am a liberal”—that is the best operationalization of political diversity. We therefore focus on

their second study, which also included a more extensive set of measures related to political discrimination. 4 We offer this additional point: In his 2011 speech to the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Haidt

reported that he was only able to identify one conservative social psychologist with any degree of field-wide name

recognition– Clark McCauley. In the three years since that talk, no other conservative social psychologist has

stepped forward, or been publicly identified, as a counterexample to Haidt’s claim that the field lacks political

diversity. The five authors of this paper know of only one additional conservative social psychologist, but he has

asked to remain unidentified. If social psychology does in fact have more political diversity than we claim in this

paper, nobody seems to know where to find it. 5 The excerpts can be viewed at http://www.yourmorals.org/blog/2011/02/discrimination-hurts-real-people/

6 We know of only one field study that failed to find discrimination against conservatives in the academy, but it is an

unpublished study that did not include psychology departments. Fosse, Gross, and Ma (2011) sent emails to the

directors of graduate studies at the 75 top ranked departments of sociology, political science, economics, history,

and literature. The emails purported to be from prospective applicants who said that they had volunteered for either

the Obama campaign or the McCain campaign in 2008. Responses were not slower or colder when responding to the

student who said he had worked on the McCain campaign. This is encouraging, but we note that the emails

described students who fit the general stereotype of liberalism – majoring in the field, wanting to use the field to

have an impact on the world, wanting to stay well rounded. Only after these impressions were offered was it

revealed, at the end of the third paragraph, that the student had worked on one of the presidential campaigns for a

few months. Furthermore, we note that the DGS was not anonymous, was accountable for his or her actions, and that

many respondents probably had text prepared to deal with the large volume of email requests received. We believe

this study incorporated several design elements that made discrimination less likely. 7 We assume that many of the conservatives in the field attempt to keep their political identities a secret, for two

reasons: 1) Only three people out of approximately 1000 raised their hands publicly to declare themselves as

conservatives when Haidt asked for a show of hands during his 2011 SPSP talk. Yet if the 6% number obtained by

Inbar and Lammers (2012) was correct, and if the audience was representative of the profession, there should have

been roughly 60 conservatives in the audience. 2) Most of the conservatives who wrote to Haidt after his talk 2011

talk specifically said that they keep their political identities secret.

political diversity will improve social psychological science€¦political diversity -- 3 political...

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